An open letter from Chris Hedges:
I invite you to join me at the Occupy AIPAC Summit in Washington this weekend.
I spent seven years in the Middle East. I lived for two of those seven years in Jerusalem. I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times. AIPAC does not speak for Jews or for Israel. It speaks for right-wing ideologues who believe that because they have capacity to wage war, they have a right to wage war.
And just as these elites were too blind and too enamored of their own rhetoric to see what invading Iraq would trigger, so too are they unable to comprehend the regional conflagration that would be unleashed by attacking Iran.
The uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Occupy Wall Street to our gathering outside AIPAC's doors in Washington are all the same primal struggle for justice. The battle for justice in Middle East is our battle. It is part of the vast, global battle against the 1 percent. It is a battle against the fossil fuel industry, the weapons manufacturers, the security and surveillance state, the misuse of public funds that wastes $ 4 trillion on wars that never had to be fought, the trillions more in looted taxpayer money to prop up insolvent banks and swell bloated military budgets, the battle to protect working men and women who are left struggling in the name of "austerity" to save their homes and find work.
Join us at Occupy AIPAC this weekend. Help us make the voices of the 99 percent—the voices of mothers, fathers and children in the squalid refugee camps in Gaza, in the suburbs of Tehran and in the bleak industrial wastelands in Ohio—heard. Yours,
Chris Hedges.
I spent seven years in the Middle East. I lived for two of those seven years in Jerusalem. I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times. AIPAC does not speak for Jews or for Israel. It speaks for right-wing ideologues who believe that because they have capacity to wage war, they have a right to wage war.
And just as these elites were too blind and too enamored of their own rhetoric to see what invading Iraq would trigger, so too are they unable to comprehend the regional conflagration that would be unleashed by attacking Iran.
The uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Occupy Wall Street to our gathering outside AIPAC's doors in Washington are all the same primal struggle for justice. The battle for justice in Middle East is our battle. It is part of the vast, global battle against the 1 percent. It is a battle against the fossil fuel industry, the weapons manufacturers, the security and surveillance state, the misuse of public funds that wastes $ 4 trillion on wars that never had to be fought, the trillions more in looted taxpayer money to prop up insolvent banks and swell bloated military budgets, the battle to protect working men and women who are left struggling in the name of "austerity" to save their homes and find work.
Join us at Occupy AIPAC this weekend. Help us make the voices of the 99 percent—the voices of mothers, fathers and children in the squalid refugee camps in Gaza, in the suburbs of Tehran and in the bleak industrial wastelands in Ohio—heard. Yours,
Chris Hedges.